iran elections

Could Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have a worse grasp on geopolitical strategy? Here’s the dubiously-reelected Iranian “President” challenging President Obama to “debate in the venue of the United Nations General Assembly” before a group of medical school deans in Iran, according to Xinhua’s re-reporting of an official Iranian press account from Saturday. But if Ahmadinejad really wanted [...]

Via David Corn at Mother Jones, no alarms and no surprises here. Only a fraudulent election upheld by the same clique that put the fix in. Hopes for a regime-based climbdown from its total rejection of the opposition now appear to be vain. The regime seems capable of withstanding more pain than the opposition is [...]

I’ve just conducted a phone interview with Akbar Ganji, one of the leading Iranian dissidents and most prominent voices in the international community for a more liberal Iran. He knows its brutality in a deeply personal way: the regime imprisoned Ganji for five years after he wrote a series of articles exposing its human rights [...]

Via Dana Goldstein, Ali Gharib makes the stellar point that what’s going on in Iran is reaffirmation of the Islamic Revolution, not a repudiation of it. Kate Klonick finds that problematic. But why, really? If Gharib is right, then what’s unfolding is a measure of reconciling the revolution with greater openness. There isn’t sufficient evidence [...]

There’s a lot to agree with in my friend George Packer’s post about what’s happening in Iran. But I think George, who excels at intellectual history, might be missing a certain crucial component of the equation when viewing Obama’s actions here through the prism of realism vs. progressivism:
With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, [...]

Bill Kristol has a post up at The Weekly Standard’s blog about what conservatives ought to do about President Obama and Iran:
There have been very good grounds to criticize President Obama’s foreign policy so far. There will be much more to criticize over the next three and a half years.
But he is our president. We [...]